One Hundred Days

by Sandy Woodward

  ‘Yes, sir,’ came the steady reply. ‘The pilot flew in low – the name Narwal is on her stern.’

  In the next few seconds I was happy at least that this was not at all the same situation as before. When the Burglar/Brazilian Boeing had come lumbering into our air-space three weeks ago, I was not absolutely certain of her identity. Neither were we at war, declared or not. Nor was the Battle Group within easy reach of the land-based Argentinian air force. Nor were we in the TEZ. But now we were at war. That was for certain: ships had been hit and sunk, planes shot down, and men killed and burned. This was not the same. Besides, I knew the identity of the trawler. We had seen her twice before, and on the last occasion I had personally told Alacrity to warn her off, just hours before we entered the TEZ. Now she was here again, not in international waters (or airspace as the Brazilian airliner had been), but right here in our internationally declared Total Exclusion Zone. Was she an innocent fishing vessel? I suspected not – not unless they were very stupid indeed. Was she shadowing my Battle Group? It seemed quite likely. Otherwise what on earth was she doing here, in this very public theatre of war, having been told in no uncertain terms by a Royal Navy commander to get the hell out of the area?

  Right now the personal risks were fairly high. If I had hit the airliner and been wrong, the whole operation might well have had to be cancelled and I would have carried most of the responsibility, public and private, quite properly. Now here I was with another high-pressure decision, with no time to take advice from above. I told myself this was what high command was all about – that I had been hired to break the rules if necessary, just so long as I was right. So, what were the probabilities? Fishermen are, on the whole, not stupid. This is not the most sensible place to be fishing this week. If they hadn’t heard it on the radio, they had heard it direct from Alacrity. So she is probably not fishing. If she is not fishing, then surely she is trailing us. There isn’t anything else to keep people at sea around here. If she is to trail us properly, she will need professionals. So there would have to be Argentinian navy personnel on board, for overall command and for reporting communications as well. While I was fairly sure there would be civilians on board the Narwal, this makes her a war vessel in my book, and in more or less anyone else’s except my book of ROE. She may not be able to damage us herself, but she can tell the opposition precisely where we are, with unacceptable consequences very close behind. Though I knew I did not have permission to attack any fishing vessel, I was fairly sure this was not a fisherman. Also I was personally very much at war. I had been fighting for nine days now and that had hardened my heart. I was standing for no bloody nonsense. From anyone.

  I ordered the two British planes to try and stop her, immobilize her, that is. Not at all easy under minimum force rules when you only have 30mm cannon and thousand-pound bombs available for a matter of minutes before the Harriers have to break off for lack of fuel. So they started with the cannon; Narwal pressed on, hoisting the Argentinian national flag as she did so. Finally the pilots asked if they could put a bomb into her – for fusing reasons as likely to blow the Harrier out of the sky as Narwal out of the water, and probably both. I did not need her to be sunk, but I did very much want her rendered totally ineffective. There was no chance I was going to let her get loose again and I gave permission to proceed with the bombing.

  Fortunately for everyone concerned, the one thousand pounder was fused for dropping from high level, and so from this low altitude it failed to go off on impact. It did hit the Narwal, killing one wretched crewman instantly and making a large hole in the ship in the process. The second aircraft peppered Narwal with cannon-fire. Narwal eventually stopped, wallowing, crippled in the swell.

  At 1220, I decided we should board her as soon as possible – by helicopter, using SBS or SAS. I had no wish to kill fishermen by sinking her out of hand if I could help it, but also I needed evidence, one way or the other, as to her employment. Invincible was told to set this up. So far, so good.

  Written later, my diary covered the next few hours of the Narwal story succinctly enough. ‘Then the saga begins: if you try to do anything unplanned in aviation or with Special Forces, it all takes sixty-two times as long. Ships improvise, everyone rehearses, checks and delays. Result is hours of bogging about, the near loss (for lack of fuel) of a Sea King Mk 4, and much confusion. No doubt it will sort itself out by breakfast tomorrow.’ At the time, I merely instructed the Ops Room to alert me when they heard the contents of the Argentinian trawler and later we reconvened the staff meeting which was planning the landings, an extremely complicated business.

  By 1400Z Coventry was reporting unknown air contacts a hundred and sixty-five miles to the west which turned out to be an Argentinian C-130 Hercules transport, escorted by two or three Mirage fighter aircraft, trying to get into Port Stanley. Coventry opened fire immediately, locking on at the far end of her range and firing two Sea Dart guided missiles at the little air convoy. The missiles all missed, apparently because the Argentinian pilots turned away to the west. When Captain Hart-Dyke informed me that Sea Dart had not been successful, I guessed it was almost certainly a range problem and told him, ‘Steady, David. Don’t fire till you see the whites of their eyes.’

  Eventually, at 1600, the Special Forces team got aboard Narwal from the Sea King helicopters, finding thirteen men on board, including one dead. They also found Lieutenant-Commander Gonzales Llanos of the Argentinian Navy and with him there was documentation which proved beyond all possible doubt that Narwal was no innocent fishing vessel. There were code books, charts, references and special military transmitting and receiving radios. But by then she was shipping water and everyone was taken off, leaving her to sink.

  When I look back upon the incident it does not send shivers up my spine quite so briskly as does the memory of the Brazilian airliner. On reflection I think many of my immediate doubts about Narwal were probably allayed by my conditioning in the North Atlantic. Russian surveillance trawlers had long been a normal part of the scenery up there. The Soviet ships were very sophisticated – and their electronic interception equipment could readily be seen by even an untrained observer. We used to call them Elint trawlers and I knew exactly what they looked like. The fact that the Narwal – which to us was just as deadly a threat – did not conform in appearance to my preconceived idea of what a spy-trawler should look like was probably the main reason for my hesitation. Nonetheless, it should be, and is always, a tough decision to break your laid-down ROEs deliberately – the standard defence, ‘Well, on balance, at the time, it seemed right to me,’ will not be any use at all if you’re proved wrong later, no matter what the ‘balance at the time’ may have looked like.

  My conclusion for the benefit of others has to be: ‘Don’t do it…unless…’ At least the Argentinians themselves regarded the matter as a ‘fair cop’, and never complained that the ‘filthy British had bombed an innocent fishing trawler’.

  Anyway, with that now off my mind, I retired for a cup of tea towards the end of the afternoon, with three problems of varying dimensions pre-occupying me. I needed to think by myself for a while because all of them had serious implications. The first one was simple. Why had Coventry’s three shots with Sea Dart all missed their target? The Coventry Ops Room claimed the target was ‘feasible’, but I know that that is machine language. It is also only a prediction and is entirely dependent on the incoming aircraft maintaining its course and speed towards the firing ship until it obligingly meets the missile at its extreme range. In other words, the target has to be co-operative! As far as we knew, all four of the Argentinian aircraft got away scot-free and I am obliged to say I faced a very similar conundrum as that which I had pondered over during the staff debriefing after Sheffield was hit: either the equipment was failing us or someone was using it incorrectly. It had to be one or the other, and by far the worst of the two options was the first. How could we possibly fight the forthcoming sea-to-air war if our main anti-aircraft missile refused to h
it where we aimed it? What I fervently hoped was that David Hart-Dyke and his team had launched it too soon, at the far end of the missile’s range, with his targets too high. This course of action gives the aircraft time to spot the upcoming threat, and take evasive action in time. By so doing, they plainly have a good chance of making their escape because by then the Sea Dart is fast running out of fuel and soon will drop harmlessly into the sea. The trick is to let the enemy planes keep on coming, let them get nearer, right into the range envelope of Sea Dart, from which there is no escape, no matter how quickly they turn away and run.

  At 1900 the problem was solved. A signal came in that Coventry had blown an Argentinian Puma helicopter (perhaps searching for Narwal?) out of the sky with a correctly aimed Sea Dart missile. Lesson learnt – I hoped – and I could imagine that rather shy smile on the face of Captain Hart-Dyke when his AWO’s shout of ‘SPLASHED!’ was heard in the Ops Room of HMS Coventry. He immediately sent me a more cheerful signal which said, ‘You will be pleased to learn the Argentinians do have whites to their eyes!’ (Years later, this entire exchange between David and myself may have been proved redundant. Some Argentinian sources admitted that two of their little air convoy had never got home that day. Had Coventry’s captain hit them after all?)

  The second problem troubling me was the Argentinian air base on Pebble Island. They couldn’t put fast-jet aircraft on the grass airstrip there thankfully, but it was entirely suitable for light ground attack aircraft like the Pucara. Various clues showed us that they had definitely deployed to the airfield and our intelligence estimated a sizeable garrison of men along with the aircraft. One aspect of this concerned me greatly: that those aircraft were awfully close to Carlos Water – only about nineteen miles as the crow flies, which in my opinion was precisely the way they would fly, straight enough, on to the British landing force. If they made around 250mph it would take them just over four minutes from take-off to come in over the Carlos Water beaches – giving virtually no notice.

  I sat in my cabin looking at the charts, wondering how quickly the Args’ air force could launch a serious attack from that desolate little outpost, right off the north shore of West Falkland. Before I had dinner I called a staff meeting for the following morning with one simple objective: to find the best way to remove all those aircraft on Pebble Island, in relatively short order, like before the earliest date for the landing.

  I wrote my diary that night rather grumpily. Looking back I can tell it betrays signs of worry, that I had a lot on my mind. That’s when I grow most grumpy. Against the time 0830 I wrote, ‘Am obviously worried for the 42/22 combination. But this trial is essential in my book. If it fails we shall all know the landing is off in sufficient time to stop it happening, at great saving of life. A long day groans on.’

  These latter references concerned my third problem. I had high hopes for using the Type 22 frigates as ‘goalkeepers’ for the Type 42 destroyers. Their job would be to catch the Argentinian bombers which managed to get past the Sea Dart and gun defences of the destroyers. The general idea was that when the incoming raiders got too close for Sea Dart, Brilliant or Broadsword could open fire with their Sea Wolf missile systems. These are specifically designed for close-range defensive work against modern, very fast missiles. We had not actually tried them against aircraft, but we felt they ought to work and, if they did, we would have the essential counter to any form of close-in air attack from the Argentinians. But two ships working together often find the whole exercise very difficult, especially when there is a requirement for split-second timing, which, in this case, there most assuredly would be. The two ships would have to operate together as a single unit, giving each other support and advice. Under attack, they should have decided that just one of them shall have the final say as to who goes where. Any other arrangement would be likely to lead to chaos, confusion and possibly catastrophe. I had to find out if it could be made to work.

  The best report would have been one which told me both ships had performed well under attack and that the Type 22s’ Sea Wolf had caught all the ‘leakers’ missed by the Type 42s’ Sea Dart. The worst news would have been that Sea Wolf had missed them and that another of my Type 42s was hit. I was actually of the opinion that if the ships could not protect each other, we probably should not land at all. Thus the ‘trials’ were occupying an increasingly important place in my thoughts. I also wrote down a very hasty account of Coventry’s own wayward marksmanship with Sea Dart, adding, a bit spitefully, the unnecessary fact that the three missiles which had apparently missed did so ‘at a cost of £750,000 to us’. Even the downing of the Puma did not please me much, since I wrote pessimistically, ‘We show a profit, but the Arg Press will no doubt make much of it as a sea – air rescue for the wretched Narwal, which turned up 50 miles off Port Stanley, for all the world as though there was no war at all and we hadn’t warned her off a week ago.’ I made a brief note that it seemed likely that Yarmouth would make it out to the tug Salvageman ‘with the not-so-shiny Sheff’. And, with some relief, I recorded that, ‘The Broadsword/ Coventry combination had the desired effect. The Args got nothing into Port Stanley today. I think I’ll have to replace them for tomorrow; twenty-four hours inshore must be very tiring.’

  Some months later I cringed a bit over the generally truculent tone of my diary for 9 May 1982, and felt obliged to write by way of explanation the following note underneath:

  The ‘saga’ concerned the boarding of Narwal, after she had surrendered to the Harriers, by the Sea King 4: but it was eventually done some four hours later, and the Narwal was finally left to sink eight hours later. I was personally very relieved to find the lieutenant-commander on board: the political consequences of shooting up an innocent trawler might have been awkward, and the Sea Harriers had not attacked before I had given my personal permission to do so, albeit with some misgivings. What decided me, of course, was that we had warned her off on 30 April.

  Before I finally went to bed I ensured that Brilliant and Glasgow were under way for the nightly bombardment of Port Stanley airfield, but we received a signal before midnight that Coventry, returning ‘home’ through thick fog, had a major defect on her main gun and might be out of action for a few days. She and Broadsword eventually rejoined us at 0615, and forty-seven minutes later we received a signal from Yarmouth that Sheffield had sunk while under tow. I made a curt note in the diary: ‘Sheffield has apparently sunk at last, perhaps saving us a lot of bother.’ Much hinged on my word ‘apparently’, which I had used because Yarmouth had actually reported Sheffield as, ‘Sunk. Am searching to confirm.’ My diary again gives a clue as to the state of my mind: ‘This is not a very confidence-inspiring statement. Like he’s not sure whether she has, in fact, sunk! Oh dear. The battle for information is never-ending and often largely fruitless.’

  The following morning the staff meeting began early and I outlined to everyone my fears regarding the Argentinian air forces on Pebble Island and their potential danger to us during, and indeed after, the landings. I laid out the options, which were after all pretty basic: either we launch a massive bombing raid and completely break up the airstrip or we try to bombard the aircraft to bits with 4.5-inch shells in the middle of the night with ‘spotting’ from helicopters with flares. Both of these courses of action offended my sense of subtlety, and efficiency, for they were not without risks and involved too high a degree of uncertainty. As I recall, I had just slipped into a facial expression which my wife describes as ‘vacant’, but which usually signifies I am lost in thought, when a chap materialized, whom I did not even realize was in the Ops Room. As far as I could tell he had either come straight through the wall, which is made of steel, or out of a cupboard, although he was a bit tall for that.

  ‘I wonder if we might be able to help out, Admiral?’ he said quietly.

  Of course by this time I had identified my resident SAS officer, who always sat in on these meetings, but who somehow never seemed to be there. I’ve always thought
that these people must spend at least half of their time practising the art of vanishing, just disappearing into the woodwork. You never seem able to see them, unless they want to be seen. I suppose that is a key part of their trade, just as moving stealthily through the ocean’s depths in a submarine was once a key part of mine. But how he managed his disappearing act in Hermes Ops Room I shall never know, dressed as he was in ‘jungly’ camouflage and six foot four tall with it.

  Anyhow, I was very glad this particular officer had spoken up. It was, he said, the type of operation for which his men were ideally suited. Given sufficient time, he felt confident they could get on to the island, make a detailed recce, and then get a force of perhaps a dozen chaps in – when they knew where they were going – and ‘take out’ all of the Argentinian aircraft. Which all sounded excellent to me, except that I did not have all that much time to give them. We were still working on that 16 to 25 May landing window we had planned back at Ascension and our general view of any attack on Pebble Island was that it must be completed by 15 May – five days from this moment. My fastest mental arithmetic told me that about 0230 on the morning of the fifteenth was what is known in the trade as ‘Drop Dead Time’ – that is, it’s time to bag the whole thing and try some other way.

  ‘How long do you have in mind?’ I asked him and for a moment he hesitated, calculating the kind of detail which is life and death to an SAS man.